I was only looking at this on You Tube and was not at the event nor have any skin in the game at this region. i don’t even know if it was called a DQ at this match.
I just wanted to start some discussion and see if we can get consistency in what I think will be one of the toughest calls in this game - did you purposely knock the beach ball out of the field?
At about 2:14 the blue robot knocks off the big ball while facing perpendicular to the goal and wall. The beach ball’s only course of travel would be to go out of the playing field. Therefore, I would consider it intentional and plan on calling them this way.
I would have considered this a violation of:
<G8> … “Teams may not intentionally remove Scoring Objects
from the scoring field, while not in the process of Stashing or removing Stashed Scoring Objects.”
If it were a side swipe, I would cosider it legal. The ball has a 50:50 shot at remaining in the playing field.
My thoughts… no DQ. Even if they aren’t trying to necessarily (and I think they were), they’re still descoring the large ball, so they would be protected by <G8>
The rule <G8> is designed to prevent teams from taking the opponent’s buckyballs and placing them out of the field to decrease the number of points they can score. A guy knocking off a large ball that happens to roll out of the field isn’t a problem. So he messed up driving. Big deal. It’s a heat of the moment type thing.
Let the field reset crew put it back, and move on with the match. This isn’t worth the energy to fight.
EDIT: Someone actually asked this in a Q&A already. IIRC, Karthik said that hitting the large ball out of the field to remove it from being capped is legal. I can’t find it now (phone), just search <G8> and you probably can.
My interpretation would be that this situation constitutes removing a stashed scoring object (note that the definition of stashed applies to both buckyballs and large balls) and so is not illegal.
I think this has been handled well with Karthik’s response, but I’d like to further defend it, anyway:
Placed in an if/then format, this says:
“If you are not in the process of Stashing or Removing stashed objects, then you may not intentionally remove scoring objects.”
When a team is in the process of Stashing or Removing stashed objects, the conditional of the if statement is not satisfied, so the rest of the if statement does not apply; this rule says nothing about what happens when you are in the process of stashing or removing stashed objects.
This is my interpretation of the rule, and what I believe to be the most straightforward. Thus, I don’t think that was worthy of a DQ.
